| It's the journey! |
| Effort counts twice! |
| Have a superordinate goal |
| Be specific! |
| Concentrate during your practive |
| Give advice and receive advice! |
| Failure can be good |
| Don't rely on willpower |
| Authoritative advice is best! |
| Use the 5 minute favor |
Hi Lillian,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 4: I have an interest I’m actively pursuing, voluntarily devoting more than 3 hours of “free time” each week .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were benevolence, achievement, and conformity.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.
You said your top three talents were analytic, social, and verbal.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a pretty good idea about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to applying to med school .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Workout 5x week .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Feeling less stressed .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Feeling overwhelmed .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I wake up on weekdays, I will study for 2 hours .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in Basketball .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Upset when receiving critical feedback, and Upset when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a lot of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being school .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .
In one word, you said it made you feel Emotional .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
| It's the journey! |
| Effort counts twice! |
| Have a superordinate goal |
| Be specific! |
| Concentrate during your practive |
| Give advice and receive advice! |
| Failure can be good |
| Don't rely on willpower |
| Authoritative advice is best! |
| Use the 5 minute favor |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
| Emily Marks |
|---|
| I had the pleasure of being in two classes with Lily this semester. In both Grit Lab and Samba Ensemble, Lily always showed up with a smile on her face, asking me how my day has been, and eager to catch up. She is extremely easy to connect with and has all of the qualities you would want in a friend. In addition, Lily always came to class prepared to share her stories from the weekly activities and listen to the stories of others. For her discovery project, Lily did both watercoloring and poetry. When Lily began her project with water coloring and realized she didn’t enjoy it as much as she had hoped, she switched projects with humility and grace. Despite switching topics, Lily was still able to fully immerse herself in her poetry. I really enjoyed hearing Lily present and thought she did an excellent job with the assignment! |
| Alex Fisher |
| Lily, I loved our time together this semester! Your smile always lights up a room and your insightful comments never fail to amaze me. Your warm and thoughtful presence has made every discussion, project, and interaction truly special. Your genuine curiosity and passion for our subjects shine through, making our learning environment both engaging and enjoyable. I want to acknowledge and appreciate your conscientious approach to our studies. Your dedication to understanding the material and your openness to different perspectives enrich our discussions in ways that don't go unnoticed. I see in you a perfect blend of a calm demeanor and an eagerness to dive deep into our academic endeavors. Your influence extends beyond our coursework, positively shaping the collaborative and supportive atmosphere we've cultivated. I loved having conversations with you about living on the west coast, the four agreements, and your curiosity conversation with a fire pilot! I loved how you had the idea to switch your discovery project after watercolor didn’t work out (by the way your water colorings were awesome!) Also, I found it so interesting and cute the relationship you developed with Sloane Pennington. Your life experience of growing up on a vineyard and working there sounds absolutely dream-like. You are such a bring shine in the classroom and outside of it. I can not wait to see what you end up doing in this lifetime! I hope to hear your poems sometime and I am going to miss being in class with you very much. - Alex |
| Sophia Nehme |
| Throughout the course of the semester, Lily has always had a smile on her face, contributing to the positive and cheerful atmosphere of our group. Something I really valued about Lily in our discussions was her ability to listen attentively. She would frequently echo back my thoughts and add to them, which helped me feel comfortable and heard. She also speaks with great intentionality, contributing valuable insights that are extremely thoughtful and constructive towards helping the conversation build. I also appreciated the similarities between our interests and our discovery project, particularly our shared high creativity scores on the O*NET, and our background in creative pursuits throughout childhood, because I felt that these similarities often made her insights relatable for me. Besides her role as a great discussion partner and team member, I also loved getting to know her, and loved when she would tell stories about Oregon and her family’s vineyard! I identified strongly with Lily’s discovery project journey due to our shared motivations to reignite our creative sparks, which had dimmed since childhood, and due to our shared experience of a curiosity conversation turned mentorship relationship. To me, her pivot from watercolor to poetry to be able to better commit to her project, reflects a willingness to adapt in the hopes of better meeting your aspirations – an embodiment of the habit and goal hierarchy concepts we have studied. I also loved hearing about her strategic use of situational cues, such as leaving the watercolor out on her dining room table and keeping her poetry document open at all times. And, not to mention, how profoundly impressed I was with the caliber of her free verse poetry (send the whole 14 pages?!?!). It’s clear that she was able to use the project as a way to really pour herself into a new interest, and I loved hearing about the journey that got her to her exploration of poetry! |
We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.